Review: 'Oculus' wastes horror potential

Being a horror fanatic sometimes is the closest one can come to actually playing Russian roulette. Most of the time, you never know what you will get when you enter the auditorium. Sometimes you can tell by the trailer that it's not worth your time, but more often than not you have to just grit your teeth, pull the trigger and hope for the best. "Oculus" is one of those rare horror films that straddles the line between good and bad. In other words, taking the metaphor as far as I can, the gun's hammer might land on a bullet, but it turns out to be a dud.

Kaylie and Tim Russell (Karen Gillan and Brenton Thwaites) had what you might call a really, really bad childhood. Tim is turning 21 and has been granted release from a mental institution after 11 years. He was committed there for shooting and killing their father, Alan (Rory Cochrane). He had a good reason, though. Soon after their family acquired an ornate antique mirror, Alan and their mother, Marie (Katee Sackhoff), began showing signs of insanity, ending in Alan killing Marie and trying to kill Kaylie and Tim before they were able to turn the tables.

While Tim has been getting professional help and has now repressed most of what happened, Kaylie has been spending those years hunting down the mirror and researching its history, one filled with several unexplained deaths. She now works for an auction house and has arranged for it to be sold there. Her plan is to then intercept the mirror before it's to be shipped, take it back to their abandoned childhood home and destroy it. She also intends to document this on video, where she can show how it affects people within its radius of influence, how that radius grows as it gains power and also present its storied history in order to prove their parents weren't insane but that it was all the mirror's fault.

"Oculus" is an ambitious horror film that doesn't quite reach its potential. While it has a strong cast who do their best with the material and a few decent frights, the story just feels like it's spinning its wheels, trying to find the traction it needs to propel forward. There's an interesting plot somewhere in there, but it's never allowed to show itself completely.

This is based on an earlier short film by the director, Mike Flanagan, and that's kind of how the movie feels. Much like last year's "The Purge," this one has a grand idea that if expanded would have made an epic horror film, but the filmmakers deliberately restrict themselves to a small cast and minimal locations, and that ultimately hurts the overall product.

Kaylie presents us with a vast history of the mirror, including teases about no one knowing when it was made and a period where there is no record of it, but we're stuck solely with the siblings and their story. Unfortunately for the movie, this backstory is much more interesting than the one we're forced to sit through, making us yearn for the better film that could've been. Between this and the open-ended finale, the whole product also just feels like a deliberately hopeful set up for a new franchise. The problem with that is the really good franchises never needed to try so hard, and that's why we wanted more.

There is something here worth your viewing time: The film's structure. This is a genuinely well-constructed movie. The entire film jumps back and forth between Kaylie and Tim's past and present, gradually doling out the story of their first encounter with the mirror as it relates to their current encounter. A lot of time and planning went into how this film was put together. This is the type of filmmaking that makes me want to maybe see more from this director, as well as get a look at the script to see how they got this across on the page. There are times when a shot will start in one time period, say looking at one of the siblings as a kid, then spin around to show us the adult version of the other. It keeps your attention for most of the film, but by the end it starts to get a little confusing as to the director's intentions for the time-shifting. Is it just nifty visual storytelling or are the two timelines beginning to cross and mesh together because of the mirror? There's never a clear answer to that, which is just another way the movie shoots itself in the foot. I enjoy ambiguity to a point, as long as there is a definite answer that I'm allowed to figure out on my own.

"Oculus" isn't entirely bad, but seeing it can most assuredly wait until it hits Netflix.

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